Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David (30 August 1748-29 December 1825) was a French Neoclassical painter famous for his picture of Jean-Paul Marat's death scene.

Biography
Jacques-Louis David was born on 30 August 1748 in Paris, Kingdom of France to a prosperous family. In the 1780s he began historical painting, and his pictures showed the severity of the end of the Ancien Regime before the French Revolution of 1789. David became a friend of Maximilien Robespierre and in 1793 painted the death scene of his hero Jean-Paul Marat shortly after Charlotte Corday killed him with a kitchen knife in his bath in Sorbonne, Paris.

In 1794, David was arrested after Robespierre's downfall but aligned himself with Napoleon Bonaparte upon his release. He used warm Venetian colors during the imperial era, and went into self-exile in 1815 after the downfall of Napoleon. He died in Brussels, United Netherlands, in 1825.